Wednesday, July 25, 2012

SO, normally, our water is shut off at 9pm and comes back on at 6am. Today, no water until almost 3pm. That meant using our back-up buckets to flush, and alcohol-based hand gels. At church, our friend who works at the Electrical Commission told us the water was off because somebody(ies) stole the main power cable that went to the pump house in the middle of the night, took the Gov’t ‘till 3 to run a new line…
SO, asked to lead worship at church tonight. Normally, 70-80 people. 20 minutes after normal start, there were only 5, so I abandoned the sound system and called people up front and did ‘ala-acoustico’. By the end of the song service, there were 40 peeps… I think they were singing louder than if we did ‘normal’…
…AND those 40 peeps, including kids all participated in Lori’s demo of Oral Rehydration skills during the service. The theme tonite was missions: safe and clean water, and the leader of the service thought something ‘missional and practical’ would be good.
… AND the guy who normally packs 3 or 4 bottles of bug-off didn’t bring one this trip, and the bite-welts are starting to accumulate…
‘Nuff said for our ‘manic Wednesday in Mexico’…

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

24 July
Hello, all!
Down in 'the Village', Lori connecting with her sewing ladies (only she can explain what they are actually making...), and I am doing some song-leading at church services.
Half of the church are out on their 'outreach trip' to work at a Nazarene church in La Paz for a week, and they took most of the musicians... so I was asked to 'help out'...
It's HOT here. NO surprise, being chapparel desert and 15 Km inland. SO, the sunset is a welcome sight, since that means its gonna cool off... I think the only time we've turned off the fan is when we leave for church...
more to come.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

01 July
Hey! This month we are going to make a push for people to sign up for the Blog. We don't have any real metrics with Blogspot to know how many people are reading the Blogs...
SO, if you are an existing MEMBER (ie, Blogspot notifies you when a new post goes up), email us at
admin@bajmission.com
with your mailing address, and we'll send you a hand-made item from Mexico in September (they are currently being made by our cottage-industry ladies).
For you newbies who signed up via our Baj EUp email 'prayer letter'... same deal. Sign up as a member, and you'll receive a thank-you in September.
Cool, no??
Chris

01 July
Hey, Chris here in Chula Vista.
I just put Lori on a flight back to Michigan to be with her younger brother who just had a significant embolic stroke... and for her to be with her family that's pretty turned up with all this.
Missionaries and their families far, far away. Until you've been in the place where you are working far, far away from your families and living away for years at a time (missionaries, multi-national corporation expat workers, diplomats, study abroad), it's hard to express the deep difficulties...when you are a 4-6-8 hours plane flight away...
It's hard.
Please pray for Lori and her family, for her brother and his wife and 4 kids...
Chris

BAJMISSIONBLOG
01JULY
The Unusually Usual…
Hey, y’all. Chris in Chula Vista. We just returned from a week in San Vicente.
It was filled with the unusually usual… which is the life and work of any modern missionary.
Lori had a fantastic time connecting with her cottage-industry women, helping them with the hundred details (I can’t get my machine pedal to work right… the needle on the machine doesn’t want to sew this particular fabric well… ). She was up late in her ‘ministry room’, working thru details for the next day.
Lori also has begun the process to bring two new women into the sewing cottage-industry. This always has a number of barriers and hurdles that must be overcome to enter the high-quality sewn product market… one woman lives in a garage-door shack without any electricity, for instance. Lori did tell me, “I really feel called to work this out for these women. When I asked the one woman ‘what will she do with the extra income from a sewing business?’, her answer was ‘buy shoes for my two children’. Their shoes were rags hanging on rubber soles with holes.”
The Unusually Usual means having to pray thru, follow the Lord and work out the hard details.
I had the Unusually Usual in the form of ‘sometimes, ya just gotta say YES when strongly asked’. I was meeting with the pastors of the Nazarene church, and we were conversing about the pastors current changes in his diabetes care (he's been moved to insulin, so last few trips I've spent hours doing 1-on-1 diabetes education with him. PTL, he's getting pretty good at it...).
The pastora then looks at me, “how soon can you start a diabetes support group in the church here? We have a number of members fighting diabetes… it feels like we’re a church of diabetics! I have somebody over here daily with some problem related to diabetes. When can you start?”
Well, I had been planning a program launch in January, I'm still lacking adequate funding, but… ‘how about early September?’was my answer.
“That will be good. Be ready for a lot of people…”
SO, the Unusually Usual means I’ll be wading into community diabetes education 4 months earlier than I was moving with.
Please pray. It seems the economic down-turn in the Village has really ramped up the robberies. Almost everyone has a story of a recent ‘robo’… so far, our little house hasn’t been hit… pray!
Your bro,
Chris